David DiSalvo is the author of "Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain’s Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life" and the best-selling "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite", which has been published in 10 languages. His work has appeared in Scientific American Mind, Forbes, Time, Psychology Today, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, Esquire, Mental Floss and other publications, and he’s the writer behind the widely read science and technology blogs “Neuropsyched” at Forbes and “Neuronarrative” at Psychology Today. He can be found on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website, daviddisalvo.org. Contact him at: disalvowrites [at] gmail.com.

The 10 Reasons Why We Fail

My research into the traits of influencers and achievers continues, and as I turn more pieces of this puzzle around to fit the whole, more ideas appear to me as a fit for this space. In this edition, reflections on falling short — more precisely, why we fail despite ourselves.

1. Like Yoda said, you just don’t believe it.

The crucial part of Yoda’s dialogue with Luke is “believe.” The human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. What matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input — what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. Here’s the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start. Another way to say that is — why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven’t convinced yourself that it’s possible?

2. Other people have convinced you of your “station.”

I’ve always thought the “know your station in life” idea to be among the most pernicious we humans have ever come up with. The only version of it I like is Tennessee Williams’: “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Love that Tennessee Williams. What’s more pernicious than the idea itself is that it’s often heaved upon us by other people, and they convince us that we are what we are and we’d better just live with it because, well, that’s what we’ll always be. Really? Says who? Show me the chapter on predetermined stations in the cosmic rule book, please. This also gets back to the feedback loop dynamic, because if this external “station” scripting is part of your input, you can expect sub-par outcomes all the time.

3. You don’t want to be a distrupter.

The word “disrupter” has taken on such a heavy, mixed bag of meanings in the last few years. Reading both popular psychology and business books, I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing to be. One thing seems certain — the notion of disrupting anything–of being the water that breaks the rock–is scary to most of us. Reason being, disruption is perceived as a threat to our threat-sensitive brains. Disruption means that consistency, stability and certainty might get jettisoned for a time, and that puts our hard-wired internal defense system on high alert. Sometimes, though, you have to override the alarms and move ahead anyway. If you never do, you’ll never know what could happen.

4. You think, “what if I die tomorrow?”

We all think this from time to time. And you know what, sure, any of us might die tomorrow — all the more reason not to waste time thinking about it and hamstringing yourself from going after what you want to achieve. Would you rather die as a monument to mediocrity or as someone who never quit striving? Which leads to the next one…

5. You wonder how you will be remembered.

The rub here is simply that, if you “die tomorrow,” will people remember you as someone who clung to stability like an existential life preserver — and is that what you really want? I know for a fact that many people do want exactly that, because it’s a comfortable niche to occupy on the obituary page. ”She/he was a good person, good friend, good….” Good is fine, but it ain’t great. You can’t strive for great achievements by dropping anchor in Goodville. My take on this is: it’s OK to wonder how you’ll be remembered, but don’t let thoughts of “good and nice and stable” effect that all important feedback loop, because if you do your brain will be happy to oblige with lots of good and little else.

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Reason: 1) you bought a toy, a Mac, instead of a real computer. 2) you bought a gadget cell phone, an iPhony, instead of an Android Galaxy SIII 3) you bought a retard tablet, a iFAD, instead of a real tablet – an Android Tablet. 4) you bought a passe MP3 player, an iPud, and didn’t realize iPuds are so over. 5) you bought a CrAppleTV and didn’t ask everyone to know it was a FLOP 4 years ago. 6) you are a AppleTard. Done.

Thanks David. It’s all in the mind thing :=) We need to change our mind output – the thoughts.

Bingo 30ish.me – how do we change our thoughts? By changing our being in context how the ‘thing’ or ‘life’ occur to us, how the situation around it occur to us and how do we occur to ourselves in that situation.

By working on these 3 questions, we compare us to the ideal occurrence and then declare to be that, always, all the time. Whenever there is as change, we go back again to 3!

A thought provoking article and a good perspective on what makes the DNA of the greatest achievers and influencers. Though when I started reading this piece, my brain automatically switched to ‘ The 10 Reasons Why I will Succeed’! We often read similar thoughts in popular pshycology and management research or books but I would like to credit David for putting some integral pieces of the puzzle together.

Using the Olympics as a metaphor, the puzzle could be interpreted as -’What differentiates a gold medalist athelete from a silver medalist athelete. At many times, the margin is so small, it is very difficult to solve this puzzle. This is how I solve this puzzle. It begins with the power of belief at any stage or ‘station’ in life and if the ‘calling’ is strong enough, it pulls us in a new dimension. This gives us a clear vision of the future, the realization of the ‘power of NOW’ and a set of ‘actions’ which will catalyze the process of transforming us into a, what I call a more aware and evolved human being.

With this as a starting point, we pull tremendous amounts of positive energies from new ideas and people. We gradually begin to see ideas become actions and at times ‘real’ life people. These people are the personification of a fragment of our mind which has become more aware and inspired through the process of knowledge, acceptance and the feedback loop as mentioned by David. What happens to our life after this a matter of choice for all the things mentioned in the article. Would love to hear more views on this and connect with more ‘aware’ friends across cultures.

Great article! Thanks for sharing David. I think in a nutshell that most of the time we are our worst ennemy and critic. It’s all about changing our state of mind, easier said than done, but I’m working on it daily =)

I believe what you did is point out the obvious, organize it, and articulate the human deficiencies.

You said that we must tackle the root of the problem—our thoughts—to be able to alter our path in life. However, thought is by itself faulty process because it is part of the human’s mental constitution. Therefore, we must refer to a grand creator, the creator of thought if we really want to tackle the problem—to figure out why we fail and how to succeed. In all the religion (and yes, religion is where you should look because it is a basis of everything whether you like it or not), human are supposed to do 2 things to succeed in life: worship God, and prosper in earth. Most of us have forgotten about the first and gone to seek out the second (a selfish act). Without fulfilling the first rule of the universe, we will simply dwell in confusion.

Dude, what was the source for these 10 reasons? Some of them I agree with, some seem hokey, and some seem to be misinterpreted (#6 – but it would take much longer than 100 words to long to explain). As I was reading the article, it occured to me that some don’t apply to me, therefore…I rationalized that they must be from some weirdo. Which is most probably false, but the thought did rouse my curiousity. You may have omitted the source for length-of-article reasons, which is fine. But in the future I would appreciate knowing the source for the 10 reasons.